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June 2012

Dinosaur bones with a difference

By Dave the dot to dot dinosaur

Dinosaur fossils (Latin  fossus, meaning ‘having been dug up’) aren’t made of bone, they are made from rock (silica).

According to Wiki there are 6 ways of achieving this, but I’ll only describe the permineralization process. First, the dinosaur had to die and be covered up pretty much immediately (such as sinking in mud) before the scavengers found it. As time passes, more sediment covers the remains and the flesh starts to rot away, leaving only the bones which decay slower.  As they decay, groundwater carrying rich minerals seep into where the bone once was. Effectively it is a mineral replacement process with the replacing of ‘bone’ mineral with ‘rock’ mineral. Once the bone has all been replaced you have a perfect replica of the original bone, but now made from rock.

Thanks to Murphy, our beautiful lady golden retriever, for modelling for this cartoon.

June 18, 2012
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A surprise Saturday cartoon

By Competitions

Well, a cartoon of sorts. I recently discovered The New Yorker Cartoon page online. It had a competition designed to test your cartoon creativity and asked people to make an animal, invention, toy, whatever, by using any 3 of the 15 shapes provided.

Although my entries were technically invalid (they only choose those from the USA), that minor rule was not going to stop me. After all, I’ve heard Australia is the 51st forgotten state of the USA.  My two submissions are below and the winners are one click away here.

June 16, 2012
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What is your version of hell?

By Pot Luck

Under normal circumstances this would be my version of hell, but a couple of years ago when we holidayed in Rio I was on a mission to hear the song during my travels. Surprisingly I didn’t have to go far or do anything special. I heard that song 3 times in one day!

I can tell that you’re now humming away silently. Well click here and chillax to Astrud Gilberto.  I also found this interesting write up on the story behind the song. Such a great hit at the time, it became the second most popular recorded song – just behind The Beetles ‘Yesterday’.

June 14, 2012
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ATM hazards

By Pot Luck

I wonder what a few rocks could buy you back then? Rocks as currency is not such a silly idea, I mean our currency here in Australia is now plastic. It just flies out of the machine – if there’s enough money in it to begin with!

June 12, 2012
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Nasty pink aliens

By Dinosaurs, Evil aliens

I promised last time I posted the first of the ‘Evil Aliens’, I’d come back sometime later to answer the question I posed – Can you guess 2 scientific errors in the making of this cartoon?  True to form, the smart readers out there not only came up with my answers, but also some of their own (see comments section on original post).

My two thoughts were:

  • hydrogen burns clear to slight blue (my planet is ablaze with yellow and orange flames)
  • to have a fire you need fuel (√ – hydrogen from the gas in Jupiter’s makeup), ignition source (√ -the nasty alien’s cigarette butt) and oxygen (× -not much taking place out there in space)
June 11, 2012
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Bubbles of fun….and the May winner is

By Bill and Ben the little green alien men, Competitions

Congratulations to Hugh for winning the May Cartoon Caption Competition. 

Click here to see the runners up

Hugh was inspired by the following mathematical discovery, in the making of this winning caption above and this other entry ‘Bill and Ben didn’t really understand the Double Bubble Conjecture, but they did throw themselves wholeheartedly into a practical demonstration.’

“When two round soap bubbles come together, they form a double bubble as on the right in Figure 1. Unless the two bubbles are the same size, the surface between them bows a bit into the larger bubble. The separating surface meets each of the two bubbles at 120 degrees. This precise shape is now known to have less area than any other way to enclose and separate the same two volumes of air, even wild possibilities as on the left in Figure 1, in which the second bubble wraps around the first, and a tiny separate part of the first wraps around the second. Such wild possibilities are shown to be unstable by a new argument which involves rotating different portions of the bubble around a carefully chosen axis at different rates. The breakthrough came while Morgan was visiting Ritoré and Ros at the University of Granada last spring. Their work is supported by the National Science Foundation and the Spanish scientific research foundation DGICYT.” (Link) Got nothing to do tonight? Why not read the paper?

June 8, 2012
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Captain Cook’s bath time

By Pot Luck

Captain Cook is famous for discovering Australia for England. They thought it would make a great gaol for the over flooding prisons back in the motherland…and so modern Australia was born.  A few facts about the Captain:

  • He mapped the Pacific on his travels to Australia. He also mapped almost all of Australia’s east coast and proved that New Zealand was its own land and not connected to Australia
  • Not realising Australia was the Great Southern land he was commissioned to search for, his ship continued south and almost hit Antarctica. He didn’t quite make it, as they had to turn north to resupply their diminishing stocks
  • He died in Hawaii in 1779. After a dispute with the local villagers he was stabbed to death by the chief – Kalanimanokahoowaha (according to Hawaiian records)
June 7, 2012
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The hazard sign at the end of the universe

By Bill and Ben the little green alien men

I wonder if Ben stopped to dine in the restaurant just next door to this useful sign, and patiently awaited further expansion of the universe?  Ever read the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Universe? I loved it. The second book in the trilogy of 5 books is ‘The Restaurant at the End of the Universe’.

And for a bit of trivia. Fans of the Hitch Hikers story celebrate the author Douglas Adams on 25 May each year, by carrying the ‘Do not panic’ towel.  To find out more about the significance of the towel, check out Wiki.

June 6, 2012
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